DICE recently offered up a preview of sorts for the long-awaited “Matches” feature coming to Battlefield 3. The new mode will allow the more competitive types and anyone into eSports set up specific matches between clans or your typical gaming pals.

Battlelog will be used to set up these “Matches” across all platforms and will require the person creating the match to rent their own dedicated server. When that's all taken care of you'll be able to determine the game type, name, start time, player count and maps, along with game settings such as friendly fire, weapons and more.

After the two team captains choose their players, and the match begins at whatever time you've set it for, you'll be tossed into a warmup phase (pictured at the top) that let's everyone get situated. Only after every player has signaled that they are ready will the match begin.

After the match has ended, and everyone's licking their virtual wounds, players will will be able to view detailed results in the Battlelog. Hopefully, we'll at some point be able to view long term stats/wins and losses for tournament play, but there's no word on that quite yet. We're also missing a firm release date still, but I cant imagine the wait will be too much longer.